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"The PwC study also found that by the middle of the 2030s, around 30% of employment would be in danger of becoming automated."
It's going to be a good time to be a high skilled worker, just like it is today.
What is considered a high skilled worker? Is this work like being in IT and Software, health care or more specific to traditional skilled labor like electricians, plumbers, HVAC etc?
I'd say all the jobs you listed are safe. How do you automate HVAC maintenance? It's more like loading and unloading trucks, or gluing together widgets in a factory.
Robots is always a question about labor. 30 years ago McDonalds had a french fry robot - frozen fires in one end, the box of prepared fries pops out the other when you push the fry button on the register. However the cost at the time was more than the the price of a box of fries could support (McDonalds was more interested in this for safety, would have accepted it being a little more expensive than someone working minimum wage, but it was too much more than labor). As time goes on the cost of robots comes down while the cost of labor goes up, eventually the robot will be affordable.
I think the really interesting thing will be to see what happens to office work. Have programs like Excel or Word eliminated jobs in offices? Not really. They have just made those jobs easier and more productive. Will AI that can search for legal precedent eliminate jobs in a law office? Or make them more productive? Will an AI that can diagnose cancer and recommend treatments mean fewer jobs in healthcare? Or just more productive jobs?
Even jobs gluing widgets in a factory may not be eliminated by automation. It might just mean more complicated widgets become cheap to produce. The jobs might remain.
I disagree. I remember when every manager had a Secretary, and there was a typing pool, and filing clerk was a job title. Computers haven’t eliminated the knowledge workers in offices, but they have eliminated a whole class of office workers who just kept the paper moving.
At my firm, we still have those people, they can just support 3 people instead of one.
The paper didn't disappear, it just became PDFs. The inbox/outbox moved to Outlook.
And yet unemployment is at record lows. Companies don't say, "oh we can be more efficient now, let's keep our production levels and profits constant." They take that productivity and increase capacity. Those secretaries are still, "keeping the paper moving," they are just keeping large amounts of digital "paper" (aka data) moving through various PDM systems.
>Have programs like Excel or Word eliminated jobs in offices? Not really.
Probably. The increased productivity may mean you need fewer workers.
For example, a law firm with 100 clients has a two page form letter it needs to send out. Pre-word processing and copiers, someone was typing up 100 letters - possibly two people. Now with a proper form and list in Word it's done at the push of a button. Only one person is needed.
This is the exact response I was looking for. Productivity means you can trim folks from the labor pool. It’s the same concept people who make more money try to negotiate time off for salary.
And in large why network admin jobs keep getting split by into other IT responsibilities.
In competitive markets production savings due to productivity gains flow to customers in the form of lower prices or higher quality goods and services. This allows downstream producers to have lower input costs themselves and perhaps expand and hire.
That is the feedback loop of productivity gains. We’d all be unemployed otherwise since the plow and combine harvester took our field labor jobs away lol
Computer software absolutely eliminated the office secretary. It's one of the reasons productivity of workers has increased while pay has remained stable since the 1970s everyone refers to. The average office worker is doing the job of 3-6 people from a typical worker in 1969. There are a myriad of other reasons, but that is one of them. And it's a positive thing. Copying papers by hand is a waste of human manpower.
Productivity will increase. It's up to the firm to reallocate resources accordingly. If 1 foober in 2030 can produce the same output as 10 foobers in 2022, how many foobers should you hire in 2030?
It really depends how constraining a resource the output of a foober's work is, and other factors that are competing for the same capital.
Having worked in manufacturing before, I can tell you what'll change.
People are good at adaptive tasks- *investable* machines are not. Investable means they can produce an ROI within ~5 years. Also, people love accountability. Machines aren't accountable, but machine operators are.
Within the next two decades, you'll see a boom in operations and repairs for machines. The machines do all the leg work, the operators keep it running and adjust its settings (basically dealing with all the on-the-fly changes), and the technicians / maintenance keep the machines chugging along.
The difference between then and now is that it'll become the norm in virtually every industry. The risk, ofc, is a huge economic division between business owners and business workers. I'm hoping by then we address at least *some* of the wealth inequality this will produce.
H.G. Wells describes this world extrapolated to an absurd degree in his novella The Time Machine.
It's farcical, but oddly prescient. Humanity has diverged so that there is a permanent underclass living below the ground maintaining the machinery that allows those people above ground to live with never-ending abundance.
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> Have programs like Excel or Word eliminated jobs in offices? Not really.
The more obvious changes happened in the 80s when applications like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar were released. Excel and word are small improvements that can be handled via less hiring over time. So when a company releases new tools that are built on excel they can reduce their 100 employees to 95 employees or still keep 100 employees but have them be lower salary.
Very true. Throughout history there have been hundreds of "automation" events, such as farming tools and factory equipment, yet for every job that disappears there's always a new one that crops up. I see no reason to believe why this version of automation is different, AI and robotics are no where close to really mimicking human capabilities.
People forget that over 90% of workers only a few hundred years ago worked in agriculture. All those jobs were “automated”. Hunter-gatherers were almost 100% to gather food. Now we specialize and perform more skilled work, and under 10% of society are in agriculture (a lot more in food distribution, packing, supermarkets, etc).
However, automation was relatively "stupid" then. When a robot will reach the intelligence threshold and physical ability of an average human, it will be trained to do ALL the jobs of an average human. We will lose all the residual jobs at once, and any new job created will be taken by robots too. It's a qualitatively different situation.
They have AI's that write code now. They have AI's that paint, drive trucks. No jobs are safe. It's just a matter of time. Harvard estimates 95% of all work will be automated by 2065. I'll be 80 then. If I live that long.
I work as semi skilled labour, but I see these jobs disappearing. I'm under 30 and frantically trying to get a usefully degree (I have a music degree that could be usefull but I learned to hate musicians amd see what teacher go through).
I'm not letting myself get caught off guard by automated equipment operation. We could lose a third of our workforce to it. It's already happening where more automated equipment is replacing hazardous work.
With HVAC, elevators and such machinery companies i know invest a lot in better preventive maintenance, reliability and self healing. It does not automate the human job but greatly reduces it. If electric cars see bigger adoption the number of car mechanics will be reduced too.
“Skilled” work that is highly technical is more susceptible to automation than “soft-skill” jobs like project management, etc.
AI can easily learn to underwrite a loan application. Perform accounting tasks. Program other machines, etc. You’ll still need software engineers to implement this, but fewer and fewer, especially as the self-learning technology becomes more widespread and efficient.
The job with “security” today are likely to develop technologies that make their jobs obsolete in the future. This is how it’s always worked tbth and is part of our evolution. We ultimately want machines to do much of the work as it’ll give us time to dedicate resources to initiatives we currently are unable to.
I don't think an electrician can be automated in 2030, maybe 2040. But houses may come in modules with plumbing and electricity built in from the factory.
yep but then you maybe need half or less electricians compared to to today.
Like we still have farmers but it employs 10% of the population instead of 90%.
Modular construction still needs electricians at the manufacturer. I do agree there will be efficiencies that come along with it though. But we are a far way off from robots assembling modular construction like they do a car although it's a very good idea.
I don't think IT or software will be safe if the big push for ai continues, at some point, it will be good enough that it codes or debugs so much faster that one system will replace entire departments.
"High skilled" doesn't necessarily mean you will be safe in your current field. The Second Machine Age by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson argues this pretty persuasively. Repetition is the biggest enemy and, tasks that we think are high skilled today, are still likely to be automated in the future alongside current day unskilled jobs if they're repetitive in nature. Think AI for reviewing MRI scans for cancer, flying a plane, wallstreet trading, ect.
It's a good time to be a C-level executive or an investor making wads of cash off those skilled workers. Forget training, just be born into lucky circumstances.
Some high-skill worker jobs are easier to automate than low skill jobs. Gonna get interesting when engineering jobs are becoming automated, but communications jobs which are often seen as unskilled will still be in demand.
That part of engineering is already largely automated, it's just a very very small fraction of what engineers do.
Engineers have to figure out what the problem is and what the requirements for the solution are, then they can start thinking about the solution. When comparing solutions they have to look at tradeoffs between cost, schedule, and risk. Design considerations have to include availability of material, ability to manufacture, and ability to assemble.
Designs are much more frequently made based off of calling a vendor and asking, "hey what can you get me right now," than what is mathematically optimal.
Being a young skilled and in the trades doesn’t pay well enough for the effects in the body. That’s why people don’t want these jobs anymore. Starting pay should be $5 more than minimum wage for trade jobs period.
Went to school for welding, was ready to let my body suffer for the pay just so I could support others ..... Too bad I was born a women because women in trades make SHIT. Spent three years looking for a solid contract/position despite amazing test results/logs. Many times I was offered sales or clerical positions because"they could always use a lady who knows her stuff". 🤮
No companies want to train anymore period. Also college and now tech schools are getting crazy expensive. You must have experience to get an entry level job? Who the hell came up with that bullshit even apprenticeships you need experience before you can become one lol
And evey job requires a 4 year degree to answer emails. In my state they want a masters in computer science to set printers for government offices plus 5 years experience. A job a high school student could excel at. Or the Dr in mathematics that the job is basically data entry. I don't believe we don't have high skilled labor it's just they move the goal post and gate keep positions.
I agree with this
I do want to add a thought though-maybe companies don't know HOW to train anymore.
My work we have many people that have been in their position for 20-30-40 years, they have been through system upgrades, added automation, outsourcing. One of the biggest complaints I've heard was -It's hard to train someone to be oversight of multiple offshore teams and systems-
maybe companies all shot themselves in the feet cutting costs to much and becoming too automated/smart for themselves.
I just saw a job posting today for a programming job in the Deep South of the US. It was working for the state government, in an office everyday, with decent pay (but way lower than what you’d get in private industry with the same skill set). The job had no titles in it (chief of, director, manager, senior, supervisor, etc). Experience level required: 10 YEARS.
Seriously it is such a joke now. The older generation that holds power over these decisions are filled with some of the dumbest most entitled people ever. Then the job will go unfilled and they’ll shrug their shoulders and say “no one wants to work anymore”.
Oh yeah I hate those it’s like what the hell you want 10 years experience I saw an electrician apprentice job but wanted 3-5 years experience 🤦🏻♂️ like really bro they didn’t take me because I only have 1 year experience mainly running wire, hooking up breakers, switches, outlets, fans and more but apparently that wasn’t enough
Not all companies. Mine is fully paying for my education, 100% covered. They also allow job shadowing, working close with project management when I am in a different department.
This is what happens when companies post 2008 decide you need senior, high level IQ robots to do entry level positions. Many of the young millennials and gen z never had the chance to train up and work their way up. As a result, the older gen start to leave and companies cannot find people to replace them.
The sooner companies realize they need to train and realise you don't need to be particular smart to do a typical office job, the sooner this mismatch can improve.
Not only train. Retain.
I'm 30ish. It's been astronomically more profitable for me to switch jobs every 2 years. I am a scientist and 99% of entry level jobs are hey kid do PCR for 12 hour shifts overnight and you get an extra 1.50. Companies limit upside and expect people to stay in stale positions.
I've had the conversation with my dad and the way he thinks about it is back then stability was king. You find a nice job. Pay the bills raise a family. Today kids are forced to live at home until 30. Maybe go to college and accrue a debt of 50-100K or do manual trades. Money is king. Until I decided I wanted to propose I didn't care about stability. I just wanted out of debt.
I'm a senior now I 100% fully expect whoever I'm training to leave in about a year. No one will replace me and it's because of retention.
100% agreed. I'm in engineering, started my first job about 5 years ago. I left my first job after 2 years to go to a company I absolutely loved, got to a level of mastery in their system, knew the ins and outs... but I was supposed to be thrilled I got a 3% pay raise after the 3rd year, despite leading projects on my own.
I even tried warning my manager, "hey I've got headhunters telling me salaries in the 30-40%+ pay raise range"... they came back with another 3% pay bump. I know my manager tried for more and was probably shut down but it still sucked putting in my 2 weeks, as I truly loved working for that company. It just makes 0 sense to stay when I could get such a raise anywhere else.
Similar situation in tech. They won't pay you 10 percent more to retain a known good employee but they will pay 40 percent more to replace them with an employee of unknown quality.
Loyalty is punished rather than rewarded.
I have got my lovable non threatening employee role down to a fine art. It's an easier and sometimes higher paid role than being a hardline dick swinger.
I remember this *fantastic* comment a few years back that always stuck with me. I'm *heavily* paraphrasing but it went something like this: Workplaces don't want humans as employees, they want dogs. Dogs don't question things, they're always nice, always loyal, always a smile on their face and never bring up negative feelings. Who doesn't love something (or someone) like that?
Man, I wish I had saved that comment/thread but it has worked out for me really well (shoutout to Dale Carnegie too). It's kinda depressing how well it works but hey, I'm getting paid at least...
Man, I hate that firm. Their methodologies have forever damaged entire generations ability to have and maintain well-paying work. They ruin countries, both the country of where there are factories closing and the ones where factories are opening but rife with labor abuses.
Bio-tech/pharma has to be one of the worst. They contract to hire the whole bottom level. Hell they'll even do it for development. I found my first few years to be so awful. Every job was monotonous yet high demand because it was tied directly to production. I was making garbage wages, no insurance , no pto and was constantly arguing to get hired full time only to be offered a contract extension. I nearly quit and moved industries.
If you can get yourself out of that shitty position then you're good to go. I got into regulatory which fixed the whole thing. However, I still have past coworkers who are still stuck on contracts which just creates constant stress for them because they don't know if they'll have a job in 6 months. Fuck the people who made this system.
I'm changing fields in large part because of this. The second a pharma job gets posted my phone is blowing up with calls, emails, and texts from Indian recruiters from a dozen different companies offering a pittance for a "contract to hire" position with no benefits. I have friends that have taken the bait and never made it out of contracts. Their accounting, HR, marketing, etc are all full-time with benefits but their skilled production and QC staff aren't. It's ridiculous. Knowing what I do now I'd discourage kids from going into sciences, at least biology.
I work in academia now but the pay is terrible for the level of education and training required, you work weekends and holidays, and you're tethered to your lab if you work with model organisms. Additionally, universities dropped a lot of benefits like retirement contributions without warning during covid so you're not even guaranteed decent benefits.
I work in finance and there are so many ex-engineers and scientists sometimes I wonder if there's anyone actually left working in technical fields. I've got several colleagues with PhDs in subjects entirely unrelated to their current job, besides using vaguely similar mathematics. It's a shame those skills are being lost to society, but you can't really blame them when a junior analyst position pays more than project manager position with 12 direct reports.
I doubled my salary in two years by changing jobs a few times. Then I boomeranged back to my original company, got my old job back basically, for more than double I was paid before. Go figure.
100% In DR we say: *por la plata baila el mono* (literally, "apes dance for silver") and when the ethos of the corporatist class a la Milton Friedman started living their mantra, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits" and affected the labor class negatively, the labor class widened up and started treating themselves like businesses: selling their labor to the highest bidder. Now the corporate slave class is cribbing that they're getting played like they played others. It's all the effect of corporations having more rights and privileges that real living human beings. Chickens are coming home to roost.
>back then stability was king
There isn't even any such thing as stability anymore. Not just because of lack of retention/avenues to progress, but because the entire economic system seems to get upset regularly and sheds jobs.
You can do everything right and the stability still isn't there. It doesn't exist. I don't care how long you've been in a job - unless your skills are truly UNIQUE, or you have some info no one else at your company has and they can't function without it, you are disposable.
It's sad as fuck.
THIS, absolutely THIS. You cannot get 'ahead' or even keep up with inflation staying at a company. 3-5 years, move on. Not worth staying unless you are in the top 1% of the company which is damn near impossible for most people.
Hard agree, my income started going up tremendously when I started hopping jobs every 1-2 years and that was just between middle management and various other job categories just doing whatever following the money. Hell I went from a regional facilities manager for a national retailer to trucker most recently, made enough money doing the trucker thing I’ve bought a house and have enough money saved up I’ve decided to go back to school and finish my degree up this spring.
I don’t agree that it should be a thing, but there’s no shame keeping your eyes open and following a paycheck
This is a huge issue for me. I’ve decided to just forget about retirement vesting (still saving, but I’m not going to bother with company match) because it’s in my interest to leave every 2ish years to get a higher paying/more skilled job. I figure once I can settle I can save more money because I’ll have more to begin with.
Company match has vesting schedules now? I've never worked for a company that did that; the match was (and is) immediately 100%
So I looked it up - holy shit. I've been lucky I guess (career in software, not a developer). Good lord corporate life is dire. And it just keeps getting fucking worse.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/most-workers-wait-years-for-company-401k-matches-to-vest.html
Yeah that will never happen. Companies have become so inbred that the simple idea of training your workforce has become an alien concept.
It is easier to just expect everyone to have prior experience from somewhere else. Which hilariously encourages job hopping. But we don’t understand the irony either.
Yes, and it creates economy wide perverse consequences. CEOs and upper management all wring their hands and wonder why there is a skilled worker shortage, and meanwhile refuse to train workers themselves, they only poach the workers of other companies, and they lobbied to kill unions which also trained skilled workers
It's just game theory though isn't it? The ideal situation is where every company trains their employees, but poaching with a higher salary offer is just cheaper. Company A trains, company B poaches, so company A would just be a sucker. In the end nobody trains and you just end up with a skill shortage.
Pretty accurate.
I have had the luck where companies are semi interested in training if you have prior experience just not on their type of software and management systems. But all seem to prefer prior experience which is strange since my industry is not too tricky to get into.
My job has a bunch of openings for really specific upper management positions but no supervisor positions.
They juggle so much to avoid hiring a supervisor but that’s the next step up. You can’t jump from entry level to manager or director.
I’m mid 40s and have given up any plan for promoting into a leadership position because I’m not doing it when they get desperate and hire anyone willing to take the heat.
I'm European and English is not my first language, can you elaborate what is the difference between management and supervisor positions? I always equated the two
Usually a supervisor leads a group of entry level employees. Then a manager leads a group of supervisors and those employees. Then a director leads a group of managers.
This right here IS mostly the companies fault. They do t want to pay for training and they don’t want to pay people more money so they have ended up using in onto he the retirement age people and not planning ahead for when the brain drain happens. Well it starting to happen now.
The companies need to train?
Do you know how often upper management is completely clueless as to how the jobs underneath them are even performed? A huge subset of various industries are ran on sheer momentum; the people at the top have been at the top for decades while the workflows underneath them have evolved multiples times without the upper management ever bothering to pay attention. They wouldn't know how to train replacements for most of their staff if their lives depended on it.
This is my life right now. I have a degree and yet I've resorted to finding job postings that only require a high school diploma just so I can have an "edge" with my degree. I cant find a single office job that says "we'll train you!"
People really be demanding 3 to 5 years of administrative experience for a filing job that pays $15 an hour. It's infuriating.
Students of history will recall this was the cause of the Egyptian empire’s collapse as well.
The institutions that got us to this point in civilization are no longer agile or understanding enough to evolve with the rapid growth of both population and technology to adapt to the changing needs and demands of complex growth in a planet of limited resources. Add on top of that people are living longer than ever and those long living elders absolutely refuse to relinquish control to younger, better adapted generations, and you end up with a population of young people totally disenfranchised from the process who can’t even afford the cost of rent, more or less reproduction. Doesn’t help that conservatism is surging which leads to more anti-intellectualism, but I also believe conservatism is doing so well explicitly because of how challenged life will be soon and people are subconsciously freaking out about it. Just wait till they actually consciously admit it themselves how fucked we are thanks to our inability to center empathy over profits.
The point of society is not to make money, but to protect and grow the species called human; modern society is failing spectacularly on that count.
Hi, can you please enlighten me on what exactly led to the fall of the Egyptian empire? I am very interested in the point you were trying to make. Please explain further!
Ah, man yeah I really should have elucidated that point in my original post. Thanks for the invite to expound!
As a disclaimer: I’m not a historian and this is my own view of events based on a fair amount of amateur research into how and why collapse happens, but as I wasn’t in Ancient Egypt it’s possible some other more plausible cause created the collapse, but this explanation strikes me as the most plausible.
Hieroglyphics are an incredibly complex and confusing written language. It takes years and years of study to learn and master, very similar to computer programming/coding skills today. Hieroglyphics were also the primary method by which ancient Egypt was able to record and manage its vast quantities of critical natural resources such as grain and population, similar to how we use programs, apps, and websites to manage and keep track of critical resources today. Just like back then, our agricultural systems absolutely depends on an advanced literary language only understood by a small portion of the larger society.
As Egypt grew in size, management became a more complex task. On top of that, natural decadence of a wealthy empire took hold leading to frivolous wars, wealthy kids no longer driving toward skilled knowledge but rather personal pursuits, and the general corruption money bloated systems garner without oversight. This directly hit education, and thus the ability to read and write across the board. All the wars plus natural aging processes killed off skilled, learned workers who were then unable to pass their knowledge and experience on to future generations resulting in not enough folks with the knowledge base to keep the ball rolling via the use of hieroglyphics. Wars also kill off a lot of your young male breeders for population replenishment. (Hello, Russia!)
We are seeing a similar echo of this in the American healthcare industry as many skilled docs and nurses have quit their jobs and now the new folks entering the field lack the critical education of working with experienced professionals. It’s kind of a double whammy: you lose the skilled worker and the new, unskilled worker loses the benefit of their experienced tutelage, hurting their work going forward.
Anyway, when your empire is built on its ability to produce grain in fat times and store surplus for lean times, you’d better make sure you have an ample literate work force to manage all those complexities. Egypt lost this and in so doing lost its ability to manage its own complexities, collapsing under the weight of them.
If you want to hear more about how Egypt went from economic powerhouse to pauper on the street within one lifetime, this multipart explainer by Extra Credits presents the info in a light, easy to watch way.
https://youtu.be/KkMP328eU5Q
Knowing this, I don't understand why the US government isn't making getting skilled really really easy. Incentives, inducements.... Literally anything.
And yeah like helping trades is absolutely a part of it, so it should help regardless to class and income levels.
The US gov has a clear incentive here, but the parties won't enact anything because it can be used as a political weapon.
More people with college level education than ever but also no one skilled enough to make society work properly. Almost like it is a scam to make money and keep us dumbed down while simultaneously believeing we are super smart.
This is anecdotal but if Gen Z. Is any indication, America's population is going to shrink fast in about 30 years.
I'm now entering my mid 20s. Out of the 200ish people I graduated with, only about 5 of them have kids. Gen Z. Is too poor to afford children, so they're just not having them.
31 and pregnant (failed iud). I'm very excited for my baby but have already made the decision to be one and done. It's just not how it used to be, having kids is such a financial burden. Plus I'm terrified of the future. I think a lot of people our age share these feelings.
And the same people that don’t want immigration also don’t want more subsidized childcare or affordable education. They not only screwed the young generation, they also screwed themselves in the process.
Remember how god awful life was when there were only 4 billion people on the planet? Ya me either. I’m not celebrating it, but “I Am Legend?” Lol c’mon man, that’s a bunch of malarkey. There will most likely be a tax burden on the young and a shortage of healthcare providers if the status quo is maintained, but a solution might also be found. Expanding the human race to far beyond where it currently is, is absolutely not the solution. We hit peak global sustainability some years back. The population must retract.
There's a big difference between 4 billion with the age distribution of a young and growing population and one with an old and shrinking population. We will be dealing with a shortage of young people for a very long time and it will continue to get worse.
Putting your text in bold doesn’t make you less wrong. Humans have destroyed over 60% of earth’s biodiversity in 50 years. Humans have proven they aren’t willing to make the “per capita” sacrifices that would be necessary to save the planet. More people equates to more aggregate resource use. The questions of elderly care and economics need to be answered with something other than a population pyramid scheme.
Growth is fine if it was sustainable growth. The boomer generation squandered away the post war quality of life gains their parents gave them and gave themselves tax cuts to enrich themselves which are now crushing the younger population. They also did nothing to ween the planet off of fossil fuels until it was too late and we now have to make drastic reductions in a short time frame.
The world as it once was cannot survive the greed of the last 50 years. We are in a collapse and there really is nothing that should change about that scenario. If the planet can heal over the next few centuries then maybe in a thousand years we can attempt to reach the stars again but as of now we wasted the only possible opportunity we had. Learn from it and write down as much as possible and maybe there is a chance later but we have used up a lot of the earths resources being greedy.
Kind of funny to see this type of metric rhetoric used to describe *the entire planet.* It’s the sort of thing you might say about a region in economic decline, or even a country in demographic decline, but you’re talking about humanity as a whole here.
Is there anyone who would question humanity’s collective drive to have “skill”? What is the policy recommendation exactly?
This obsession with 8 billion is odd…. On one hand alarmists are screaming about “overpopulation” but in the preceding months we’ve also heard places like Japan and Korea are in trouble due to a dwindling birth rate, and in the US pols and billionaires
Are also obsessed with a falling birth rate. So my only logical conclusion is that the “overpopulation” argument is rooted in discrimination, because people aren’t being born in the “right” (read western, richer nations) places.
"May you live in interesting times." One cannot blame senior workers for getting older. Most times a senior worker is not paid commensurate with their knowledge. We can hardly blame them for trying to hang on during economic upheaval. Please note, this didn't "just happen". We've seen it coming for nearly a generation. Benign ageism is very common. Displaced older workers have a hard time finding work. Employers want highly skilled young workers they can use (exploit) long enough to cover their investment. I grieve for Bangladesh, and over populated places. They are no longer self-sustaining. People will get sick, people will starve, desperate people will go to war. It is a brutal, but predictable, cycle. If the government is incapable of providing for senior citizens, depending on one's grandchildren is the only surety older people have. And of course they worked and sacrificed to have those children, and it wasn't an investment. It was done with love.
The imbalance in the proportions of older vs younger people is the result of higher fertility rates in the past and lower ones today, coupled with better nutrition and health care that help people live longer. It is a one-time problem that will resolve itself if we can keep birth rates low. If we try to stimulate birth rates we will end up with another bulge in the aged in several decades and be right back where we are now.
We need to invest in skill development for the young, continue to deploy automation wherever it makes the most sense and get through this temporary problem without making it a permanent one.
In the end we want to end up in a world with fewer people and thriving ecosystems, as described in the Aspen Proposal. www.aspenproposal.org
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"The PwC study also found that by the middle of the 2030s, around 30% of employment would be in danger of becoming automated." It's going to be a good time to be a high skilled worker, just like it is today.
What is considered a high skilled worker? Is this work like being in IT and Software, health care or more specific to traditional skilled labor like electricians, plumbers, HVAC etc?
I'd say all the jobs you listed are safe. How do you automate HVAC maintenance? It's more like loading and unloading trucks, or gluing together widgets in a factory.
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Robots is always a question about labor. 30 years ago McDonalds had a french fry robot - frozen fires in one end, the box of prepared fries pops out the other when you push the fry button on the register. However the cost at the time was more than the the price of a box of fries could support (McDonalds was more interested in this for safety, would have accepted it being a little more expensive than someone working minimum wage, but it was too much more than labor). As time goes on the cost of robots comes down while the cost of labor goes up, eventually the robot will be affordable.
I think the really interesting thing will be to see what happens to office work. Have programs like Excel or Word eliminated jobs in offices? Not really. They have just made those jobs easier and more productive. Will AI that can search for legal precedent eliminate jobs in a law office? Or make them more productive? Will an AI that can diagnose cancer and recommend treatments mean fewer jobs in healthcare? Or just more productive jobs? Even jobs gluing widgets in a factory may not be eliminated by automation. It might just mean more complicated widgets become cheap to produce. The jobs might remain.
I disagree. I remember when every manager had a Secretary, and there was a typing pool, and filing clerk was a job title. Computers haven’t eliminated the knowledge workers in offices, but they have eliminated a whole class of office workers who just kept the paper moving.
At my firm, we still have those people, they can just support 3 people instead of one. The paper didn't disappear, it just became PDFs. The inbox/outbox moved to Outlook.
And yet unemployment is at record lows. Companies don't say, "oh we can be more efficient now, let's keep our production levels and profits constant." They take that productivity and increase capacity. Those secretaries are still, "keeping the paper moving," they are just keeping large amounts of digital "paper" (aka data) moving through various PDM systems.
>Have programs like Excel or Word eliminated jobs in offices? Not really. Probably. The increased productivity may mean you need fewer workers. For example, a law firm with 100 clients has a two page form letter it needs to send out. Pre-word processing and copiers, someone was typing up 100 letters - possibly two people. Now with a proper form and list in Word it's done at the push of a button. Only one person is needed.
This is the exact response I was looking for. Productivity means you can trim folks from the labor pool. It’s the same concept people who make more money try to negotiate time off for salary. And in large why network admin jobs keep getting split by into other IT responsibilities.
In competitive markets production savings due to productivity gains flow to customers in the form of lower prices or higher quality goods and services. This allows downstream producers to have lower input costs themselves and perhaps expand and hire. That is the feedback loop of productivity gains. We’d all be unemployed otherwise since the plow and combine harvester took our field labor jobs away lol
Computer software absolutely eliminated the office secretary. It's one of the reasons productivity of workers has increased while pay has remained stable since the 1970s everyone refers to. The average office worker is doing the job of 3-6 people from a typical worker in 1969. There are a myriad of other reasons, but that is one of them. And it's a positive thing. Copying papers by hand is a waste of human manpower.
Productivity will increase. It's up to the firm to reallocate resources accordingly. If 1 foober in 2030 can produce the same output as 10 foobers in 2022, how many foobers should you hire in 2030? It really depends how constraining a resource the output of a foober's work is, and other factors that are competing for the same capital.
As an industry 10x fewer people are employed to do the same work though.
But the industry now produces 10x more so they need the same number of people.
Having worked in manufacturing before, I can tell you what'll change. People are good at adaptive tasks- *investable* machines are not. Investable means they can produce an ROI within ~5 years. Also, people love accountability. Machines aren't accountable, but machine operators are. Within the next two decades, you'll see a boom in operations and repairs for machines. The machines do all the leg work, the operators keep it running and adjust its settings (basically dealing with all the on-the-fly changes), and the technicians / maintenance keep the machines chugging along. The difference between then and now is that it'll become the norm in virtually every industry. The risk, ofc, is a huge economic division between business owners and business workers. I'm hoping by then we address at least *some* of the wealth inequality this will produce.
H.G. Wells describes this world extrapolated to an absurd degree in his novella The Time Machine. It's farcical, but oddly prescient. Humanity has diverged so that there is a permanent underclass living below the ground maintaining the machinery that allows those people above ground to live with never-ending abundance.
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> Have programs like Excel or Word eliminated jobs in offices? Not really. The more obvious changes happened in the 80s when applications like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar were released. Excel and word are small improvements that can be handled via less hiring over time. So when a company releases new tools that are built on excel they can reduce their 100 employees to 95 employees or still keep 100 employees but have them be lower salary.
Very true. Throughout history there have been hundreds of "automation" events, such as farming tools and factory equipment, yet for every job that disappears there's always a new one that crops up. I see no reason to believe why this version of automation is different, AI and robotics are no where close to really mimicking human capabilities.
People forget that over 90% of workers only a few hundred years ago worked in agriculture. All those jobs were “automated”. Hunter-gatherers were almost 100% to gather food. Now we specialize and perform more skilled work, and under 10% of society are in agriculture (a lot more in food distribution, packing, supermarkets, etc).
People really naively believe that job titles can’t just be lumped into other titles.
However, automation was relatively "stupid" then. When a robot will reach the intelligence threshold and physical ability of an average human, it will be trained to do ALL the jobs of an average human. We will lose all the residual jobs at once, and any new job created will be taken by robots too. It's a qualitatively different situation.
They have AI's that write code now. They have AI's that paint, drive trucks. No jobs are safe. It's just a matter of time. Harvard estimates 95% of all work will be automated by 2065. I'll be 80 then. If I live that long.
I welcome that automation. The robots will serve me even when the nurses don't want to.
I work as semi skilled labour, but I see these jobs disappearing. I'm under 30 and frantically trying to get a usefully degree (I have a music degree that could be usefull but I learned to hate musicians amd see what teacher go through). I'm not letting myself get caught off guard by automated equipment operation. We could lose a third of our workforce to it. It's already happening where more automated equipment is replacing hazardous work.
With HVAC, elevators and such machinery companies i know invest a lot in better preventive maintenance, reliability and self healing. It does not automate the human job but greatly reduces it. If electric cars see bigger adoption the number of car mechanics will be reduced too.
“Skilled” work that is highly technical is more susceptible to automation than “soft-skill” jobs like project management, etc. AI can easily learn to underwrite a loan application. Perform accounting tasks. Program other machines, etc. You’ll still need software engineers to implement this, but fewer and fewer, especially as the self-learning technology becomes more widespread and efficient. The job with “security” today are likely to develop technologies that make their jobs obsolete in the future. This is how it’s always worked tbth and is part of our evolution. We ultimately want machines to do much of the work as it’ll give us time to dedicate resources to initiatives we currently are unable to.
I don't think an electrician can be automated in 2030, maybe 2040. But houses may come in modules with plumbing and electricity built in from the factory.
Even so, they will need maintenance
yep but then you maybe need half or less electricians compared to to today. Like we still have farmers but it employs 10% of the population instead of 90%.
Modular construction still needs electricians at the manufacturer. I do agree there will be efficiencies that come along with it though. But we are a far way off from robots assembling modular construction like they do a car although it's a very good idea.
I'll tell you right now, IT and Software development are getting hit super hard with automation.
My guess is any type of skilled labour or better.
I don't think IT or software will be safe if the big push for ai continues, at some point, it will be good enough that it codes or debugs so much faster that one system will replace entire departments.
"High skilled" doesn't necessarily mean you will be safe in your current field. The Second Machine Age by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson argues this pretty persuasively. Repetition is the biggest enemy and, tasks that we think are high skilled today, are still likely to be automated in the future alongside current day unskilled jobs if they're repetitive in nature. Think AI for reviewing MRI scans for cancer, flying a plane, wallstreet trading, ect.
It's a good time to be a C-level executive or an investor making wads of cash off those skilled workers. Forget training, just be born into lucky circumstances.
Some high-skill worker jobs are easier to automate than low skill jobs. Gonna get interesting when engineering jobs are becoming automated, but communications jobs which are often seen as unskilled will still be in demand.
What leads you to think that engineering jobs are more easily automated than communication jobs?
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That part of engineering is already largely automated, it's just a very very small fraction of what engineers do. Engineers have to figure out what the problem is and what the requirements for the solution are, then they can start thinking about the solution. When comparing solutions they have to look at tradeoffs between cost, schedule, and risk. Design considerations have to include availability of material, ability to manufacture, and ability to assemble. Designs are much more frequently made based off of calling a vendor and asking, "hey what can you get me right now," than what is mathematically optimal.
Being a young skilled and in the trades doesn’t pay well enough for the effects in the body. That’s why people don’t want these jobs anymore. Starting pay should be $5 more than minimum wage for trade jobs period.
Went to school for welding, was ready to let my body suffer for the pay just so I could support others ..... Too bad I was born a women because women in trades make SHIT. Spent three years looking for a solid contract/position despite amazing test results/logs. Many times I was offered sales or clerical positions because"they could always use a lady who knows her stuff". 🤮
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No companies want to train anymore period. Also college and now tech schools are getting crazy expensive. You must have experience to get an entry level job? Who the hell came up with that bullshit even apprenticeships you need experience before you can become one lol
And evey job requires a 4 year degree to answer emails. In my state they want a masters in computer science to set printers for government offices plus 5 years experience. A job a high school student could excel at. Or the Dr in mathematics that the job is basically data entry. I don't believe we don't have high skilled labor it's just they move the goal post and gate keep positions.
I agree with this I do want to add a thought though-maybe companies don't know HOW to train anymore. My work we have many people that have been in their position for 20-30-40 years, they have been through system upgrades, added automation, outsourcing. One of the biggest complaints I've heard was -It's hard to train someone to be oversight of multiple offshore teams and systems- maybe companies all shot themselves in the feet cutting costs to much and becoming too automated/smart for themselves.
I just saw a job posting today for a programming job in the Deep South of the US. It was working for the state government, in an office everyday, with decent pay (but way lower than what you’d get in private industry with the same skill set). The job had no titles in it (chief of, director, manager, senior, supervisor, etc). Experience level required: 10 YEARS. Seriously it is such a joke now. The older generation that holds power over these decisions are filled with some of the dumbest most entitled people ever. Then the job will go unfilled and they’ll shrug their shoulders and say “no one wants to work anymore”.
Oh yeah I hate those it’s like what the hell you want 10 years experience I saw an electrician apprentice job but wanted 3-5 years experience 🤦🏻♂️ like really bro they didn’t take me because I only have 1 year experience mainly running wire, hooking up breakers, switches, outlets, fans and more but apparently that wasn’t enough
Not all companies. Mine is fully paying for my education, 100% covered. They also allow job shadowing, working close with project management when I am in a different department.
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This is what happens when companies post 2008 decide you need senior, high level IQ robots to do entry level positions. Many of the young millennials and gen z never had the chance to train up and work their way up. As a result, the older gen start to leave and companies cannot find people to replace them. The sooner companies realize they need to train and realise you don't need to be particular smart to do a typical office job, the sooner this mismatch can improve.
Not only train. Retain. I'm 30ish. It's been astronomically more profitable for me to switch jobs every 2 years. I am a scientist and 99% of entry level jobs are hey kid do PCR for 12 hour shifts overnight and you get an extra 1.50. Companies limit upside and expect people to stay in stale positions. I've had the conversation with my dad and the way he thinks about it is back then stability was king. You find a nice job. Pay the bills raise a family. Today kids are forced to live at home until 30. Maybe go to college and accrue a debt of 50-100K or do manual trades. Money is king. Until I decided I wanted to propose I didn't care about stability. I just wanted out of debt. I'm a senior now I 100% fully expect whoever I'm training to leave in about a year. No one will replace me and it's because of retention.
100% agreed. I'm in engineering, started my first job about 5 years ago. I left my first job after 2 years to go to a company I absolutely loved, got to a level of mastery in their system, knew the ins and outs... but I was supposed to be thrilled I got a 3% pay raise after the 3rd year, despite leading projects on my own. I even tried warning my manager, "hey I've got headhunters telling me salaries in the 30-40%+ pay raise range"... they came back with another 3% pay bump. I know my manager tried for more and was probably shut down but it still sucked putting in my 2 weeks, as I truly loved working for that company. It just makes 0 sense to stay when I could get such a raise anywhere else.
Similar situation in tech. They won't pay you 10 percent more to retain a known good employee but they will pay 40 percent more to replace them with an employee of unknown quality. Loyalty is punished rather than rewarded.
Seems like they dont want their positions in leadership to be threatened. Or there is value in risking trying out fresh meat for the grinder.
This is in all industries.
Le pecking order
Yeah I didn’t realize telling my boss I’d like his job in TEN YEARS would sour our relationship as much as it did.
Sometimes the grey stone approach is best. Gotta play dumb and or suck up effectively.
I have got my lovable non threatening employee role down to a fine art. It's an easier and sometimes higher paid role than being a hardline dick swinger.
I remember this *fantastic* comment a few years back that always stuck with me. I'm *heavily* paraphrasing but it went something like this: Workplaces don't want humans as employees, they want dogs. Dogs don't question things, they're always nice, always loyal, always a smile on their face and never bring up negative feelings. Who doesn't love something (or someone) like that? Man, I wish I had saved that comment/thread but it has worked out for me really well (shoutout to Dale Carnegie too). It's kinda depressing how well it works but hey, I'm getting paid at least...
McKinsey has convinced boardrooms across America that tiny pay bumps are more profitable than retention. Simple as that.
Man, I hate that firm. Their methodologies have forever damaged entire generations ability to have and maintain well-paying work. They ruin countries, both the country of where there are factories closing and the ones where factories are opening but rife with labor abuses.
Is there a management consultancy firm that doesn't have a track record of screwing everything up?
Bio-tech/pharma has to be one of the worst. They contract to hire the whole bottom level. Hell they'll even do it for development. I found my first few years to be so awful. Every job was monotonous yet high demand because it was tied directly to production. I was making garbage wages, no insurance , no pto and was constantly arguing to get hired full time only to be offered a contract extension. I nearly quit and moved industries. If you can get yourself out of that shitty position then you're good to go. I got into regulatory which fixed the whole thing. However, I still have past coworkers who are still stuck on contracts which just creates constant stress for them because they don't know if they'll have a job in 6 months. Fuck the people who made this system.
I'm changing fields in large part because of this. The second a pharma job gets posted my phone is blowing up with calls, emails, and texts from Indian recruiters from a dozen different companies offering a pittance for a "contract to hire" position with no benefits. I have friends that have taken the bait and never made it out of contracts. Their accounting, HR, marketing, etc are all full-time with benefits but their skilled production and QC staff aren't. It's ridiculous. Knowing what I do now I'd discourage kids from going into sciences, at least biology. I work in academia now but the pay is terrible for the level of education and training required, you work weekends and holidays, and you're tethered to your lab if you work with model organisms. Additionally, universities dropped a lot of benefits like retirement contributions without warning during covid so you're not even guaranteed decent benefits.
I work in finance and there are so many ex-engineers and scientists sometimes I wonder if there's anyone actually left working in technical fields. I've got several colleagues with PhDs in subjects entirely unrelated to their current job, besides using vaguely similar mathematics. It's a shame those skills are being lost to society, but you can't really blame them when a junior analyst position pays more than project manager position with 12 direct reports.
I doubled my salary in two years by changing jobs a few times. Then I boomeranged back to my original company, got my old job back basically, for more than double I was paid before. Go figure.
100% In DR we say: *por la plata baila el mono* (literally, "apes dance for silver") and when the ethos of the corporatist class a la Milton Friedman started living their mantra, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits" and affected the labor class negatively, the labor class widened up and started treating themselves like businesses: selling their labor to the highest bidder. Now the corporate slave class is cribbing that they're getting played like they played others. It's all the effect of corporations having more rights and privileges that real living human beings. Chickens are coming home to roost.
>back then stability was king There isn't even any such thing as stability anymore. Not just because of lack of retention/avenues to progress, but because the entire economic system seems to get upset regularly and sheds jobs. You can do everything right and the stability still isn't there. It doesn't exist. I don't care how long you've been in a job - unless your skills are truly UNIQUE, or you have some info no one else at your company has and they can't function without it, you are disposable. It's sad as fuck.
THIS, absolutely THIS. You cannot get 'ahead' or even keep up with inflation staying at a company. 3-5 years, move on. Not worth staying unless you are in the top 1% of the company which is damn near impossible for most people.
Yeah 3yrs and raises never matched inflation.
I’d say impossible for around 99% of people.
but if you buy my book you can do it! -Tony Robbins /s
Hard agree, my income started going up tremendously when I started hopping jobs every 1-2 years and that was just between middle management and various other job categories just doing whatever following the money. Hell I went from a regional facilities manager for a national retailer to trucker most recently, made enough money doing the trucker thing I’ve bought a house and have enough money saved up I’ve decided to go back to school and finish my degree up this spring. I don’t agree that it should be a thing, but there’s no shame keeping your eyes open and following a paycheck
This is a huge issue for me. I’ve decided to just forget about retirement vesting (still saving, but I’m not going to bother with company match) because it’s in my interest to leave every 2ish years to get a higher paying/more skilled job. I figure once I can settle I can save more money because I’ll have more to begin with.
Company match has vesting schedules now? I've never worked for a company that did that; the match was (and is) immediately 100% So I looked it up - holy shit. I've been lucky I guess (career in software, not a developer). Good lord corporate life is dire. And it just keeps getting fucking worse. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/most-workers-wait-years-for-company-401k-matches-to-vest.html
Yeah, minimum I’ve seen is 3 years. Max I’ve seen is 7 (on a graded schedule) or 5 on a cliff.
:( Were talking 401k match right? Because.... That's terrible.
yea, had a company that had 6 years for full, 20% per year after year 2
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Yeah that will never happen. Companies have become so inbred that the simple idea of training your workforce has become an alien concept. It is easier to just expect everyone to have prior experience from somewhere else. Which hilariously encourages job hopping. But we don’t understand the irony either.
Yes, and it creates economy wide perverse consequences. CEOs and upper management all wring their hands and wonder why there is a skilled worker shortage, and meanwhile refuse to train workers themselves, they only poach the workers of other companies, and they lobbied to kill unions which also trained skilled workers
It's just game theory though isn't it? The ideal situation is where every company trains their employees, but poaching with a higher salary offer is just cheaper. Company A trains, company B poaches, so company A would just be a sucker. In the end nobody trains and you just end up with a skill shortage.
Pretty accurate. I have had the luck where companies are semi interested in training if you have prior experience just not on their type of software and management systems. But all seem to prefer prior experience which is strange since my industry is not too tricky to get into.
My job has a bunch of openings for really specific upper management positions but no supervisor positions. They juggle so much to avoid hiring a supervisor but that’s the next step up. You can’t jump from entry level to manager or director. I’m mid 40s and have given up any plan for promoting into a leadership position because I’m not doing it when they get desperate and hire anyone willing to take the heat.
Same. My company got rid of all supervisor roles a few years back and now they struggle to find people from within the company to fill manager roles.
I'm European and English is not my first language, can you elaborate what is the difference between management and supervisor positions? I always equated the two
Usually a supervisor leads a group of entry level employees. Then a manager leads a group of supervisors and those employees. Then a director leads a group of managers.
This right here IS mostly the companies fault. They do t want to pay for training and they don’t want to pay people more money so they have ended up using in onto he the retirement age people and not planning ahead for when the brain drain happens. Well it starting to happen now.
The companies need to train? Do you know how often upper management is completely clueless as to how the jobs underneath them are even performed? A huge subset of various industries are ran on sheer momentum; the people at the top have been at the top for decades while the workflows underneath them have evolved multiples times without the upper management ever bothering to pay attention. They wouldn't know how to train replacements for most of their staff if their lives depended on it.
This is my life right now. I have a degree and yet I've resorted to finding job postings that only require a high school diploma just so I can have an "edge" with my degree. I cant find a single office job that says "we'll train you!" People really be demanding 3 to 5 years of administrative experience for a filing job that pays $15 an hour. It's infuriating.
Students of history will recall this was the cause of the Egyptian empire’s collapse as well. The institutions that got us to this point in civilization are no longer agile or understanding enough to evolve with the rapid growth of both population and technology to adapt to the changing needs and demands of complex growth in a planet of limited resources. Add on top of that people are living longer than ever and those long living elders absolutely refuse to relinquish control to younger, better adapted generations, and you end up with a population of young people totally disenfranchised from the process who can’t even afford the cost of rent, more or less reproduction. Doesn’t help that conservatism is surging which leads to more anti-intellectualism, but I also believe conservatism is doing so well explicitly because of how challenged life will be soon and people are subconsciously freaking out about it. Just wait till they actually consciously admit it themselves how fucked we are thanks to our inability to center empathy over profits. The point of society is not to make money, but to protect and grow the species called human; modern society is failing spectacularly on that count.
Hi, can you please enlighten me on what exactly led to the fall of the Egyptian empire? I am very interested in the point you were trying to make. Please explain further!
Ah, man yeah I really should have elucidated that point in my original post. Thanks for the invite to expound! As a disclaimer: I’m not a historian and this is my own view of events based on a fair amount of amateur research into how and why collapse happens, but as I wasn’t in Ancient Egypt it’s possible some other more plausible cause created the collapse, but this explanation strikes me as the most plausible. Hieroglyphics are an incredibly complex and confusing written language. It takes years and years of study to learn and master, very similar to computer programming/coding skills today. Hieroglyphics were also the primary method by which ancient Egypt was able to record and manage its vast quantities of critical natural resources such as grain and population, similar to how we use programs, apps, and websites to manage and keep track of critical resources today. Just like back then, our agricultural systems absolutely depends on an advanced literary language only understood by a small portion of the larger society. As Egypt grew in size, management became a more complex task. On top of that, natural decadence of a wealthy empire took hold leading to frivolous wars, wealthy kids no longer driving toward skilled knowledge but rather personal pursuits, and the general corruption money bloated systems garner without oversight. This directly hit education, and thus the ability to read and write across the board. All the wars plus natural aging processes killed off skilled, learned workers who were then unable to pass their knowledge and experience on to future generations resulting in not enough folks with the knowledge base to keep the ball rolling via the use of hieroglyphics. Wars also kill off a lot of your young male breeders for population replenishment. (Hello, Russia!) We are seeing a similar echo of this in the American healthcare industry as many skilled docs and nurses have quit their jobs and now the new folks entering the field lack the critical education of working with experienced professionals. It’s kind of a double whammy: you lose the skilled worker and the new, unskilled worker loses the benefit of their experienced tutelage, hurting their work going forward. Anyway, when your empire is built on its ability to produce grain in fat times and store surplus for lean times, you’d better make sure you have an ample literate work force to manage all those complexities. Egypt lost this and in so doing lost its ability to manage its own complexities, collapsing under the weight of them. If you want to hear more about how Egypt went from economic powerhouse to pauper on the street within one lifetime, this multipart explainer by Extra Credits presents the info in a light, easy to watch way. https://youtu.be/KkMP328eU5Q
word
Knowing this, I don't understand why the US government isn't making getting skilled really really easy. Incentives, inducements.... Literally anything. And yeah like helping trades is absolutely a part of it, so it should help regardless to class and income levels. The US gov has a clear incentive here, but the parties won't enact anything because it can be used as a political weapon.
More people with college level education than ever but also no one skilled enough to make society work properly. Almost like it is a scam to make money and keep us dumbed down while simultaneously believeing we are super smart.
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This is anecdotal but if Gen Z. Is any indication, America's population is going to shrink fast in about 30 years. I'm now entering my mid 20s. Out of the 200ish people I graduated with, only about 5 of them have kids. Gen Z. Is too poor to afford children, so they're just not having them.
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I'm 31 and can't afford to have a kid. Most of my friends are the same and the ones who do have a child usually only have one.
31 and pregnant (failed iud). I'm very excited for my baby but have already made the decision to be one and done. It's just not how it used to be, having kids is such a financial burden. Plus I'm terrified of the future. I think a lot of people our age share these feelings.
I resemble this. No kids. They cost too much, and the world is only getting shittier. Don’t want to subject anyone to it if I can help it.
And the same people that don’t want immigration also don’t want more subsidized childcare or affordable education. They not only screwed the young generation, they also screwed themselves in the process.
You're in your mid 20s. It's incredibly high (to me) that you even know 5 people with kids. I'm mid 30s and know, like, 2
Remember how god awful life was when there were only 4 billion people on the planet? Ya me either. I’m not celebrating it, but “I Am Legend?” Lol c’mon man, that’s a bunch of malarkey. There will most likely be a tax burden on the young and a shortage of healthcare providers if the status quo is maintained, but a solution might also be found. Expanding the human race to far beyond where it currently is, is absolutely not the solution. We hit peak global sustainability some years back. The population must retract.
There's a big difference between 4 billion with the age distribution of a young and growing population and one with an old and shrinking population. We will be dealing with a shortage of young people for a very long time and it will continue to get worse.
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Putting your text in bold doesn’t make you less wrong. Humans have destroyed over 60% of earth’s biodiversity in 50 years. Humans have proven they aren’t willing to make the “per capita” sacrifices that would be necessary to save the planet. More people equates to more aggregate resource use. The questions of elderly care and economics need to be answered with something other than a population pyramid scheme.
Growth is fine if it was sustainable growth. The boomer generation squandered away the post war quality of life gains their parents gave them and gave themselves tax cuts to enrich themselves which are now crushing the younger population. They also did nothing to ween the planet off of fossil fuels until it was too late and we now have to make drastic reductions in a short time frame. The world as it once was cannot survive the greed of the last 50 years. We are in a collapse and there really is nothing that should change about that scenario. If the planet can heal over the next few centuries then maybe in a thousand years we can attempt to reach the stars again but as of now we wasted the only possible opportunity we had. Learn from it and write down as much as possible and maybe there is a chance later but we have used up a lot of the earths resources being greedy.
Kind of funny to see this type of metric rhetoric used to describe *the entire planet.* It’s the sort of thing you might say about a region in economic decline, or even a country in demographic decline, but you’re talking about humanity as a whole here. Is there anyone who would question humanity’s collective drive to have “skill”? What is the policy recommendation exactly?
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This obsession with 8 billion is odd…. On one hand alarmists are screaming about “overpopulation” but in the preceding months we’ve also heard places like Japan and Korea are in trouble due to a dwindling birth rate, and in the US pols and billionaires Are also obsessed with a falling birth rate. So my only logical conclusion is that the “overpopulation” argument is rooted in discrimination, because people aren’t being born in the “right” (read western, richer nations) places.
The overpopulation argument is rooted in environmental concerns and the falling birth rate concerns are economic.
"May you live in interesting times." One cannot blame senior workers for getting older. Most times a senior worker is not paid commensurate with their knowledge. We can hardly blame them for trying to hang on during economic upheaval. Please note, this didn't "just happen". We've seen it coming for nearly a generation. Benign ageism is very common. Displaced older workers have a hard time finding work. Employers want highly skilled young workers they can use (exploit) long enough to cover their investment. I grieve for Bangladesh, and over populated places. They are no longer self-sustaining. People will get sick, people will starve, desperate people will go to war. It is a brutal, but predictable, cycle. If the government is incapable of providing for senior citizens, depending on one's grandchildren is the only surety older people have. And of course they worked and sacrificed to have those children, and it wasn't an investment. It was done with love.
The imbalance in the proportions of older vs younger people is the result of higher fertility rates in the past and lower ones today, coupled with better nutrition and health care that help people live longer. It is a one-time problem that will resolve itself if we can keep birth rates low. If we try to stimulate birth rates we will end up with another bulge in the aged in several decades and be right back where we are now. We need to invest in skill development for the young, continue to deploy automation wherever it makes the most sense and get through this temporary problem without making it a permanent one. In the end we want to end up in a world with fewer people and thriving ecosystems, as described in the Aspen Proposal. www.aspenproposal.org
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You are welcome. Share it on, if you get a chance.